Nine people, including three students travelling in a pool car, its driver and an attendant, were injured after a bus hit the vehicle while trying to avoid hitting a mother and child crossing the road near Behala in southwest Kolkata on Tuesday morning.
Police said none of the three pre-school children in the Maruti Omni who had cuts and bruises needed to be hospitalised. They were handed over to their school — Kidzee — and their guardians.
Two of the three students are three years old and the third one is a four-year-old.
Some of the other injured suffered fractures and were admitted to hospital.
A passenger who was on the bus said the accident occurred when the bus driver tried to avert a collision with a woman crossing the road holding her child.
The accident happened around 8.50am on congested Biren Roy Road, near Vidya Bharati school, when a bus on route 12C/1 rammed into the pool car from the side.
The pool car was ferrying three students and an attendant.
“I was standing at the rear end of the bus when there was a very strong jerk. Upon impact, we all toppled over each other. I became senseless on the spot. When I opened my eyes, someone had brought me down from the bus and I was sitting in a vehicle. There was chaos all around,” said injured bus passenger Poonam Dhanuk, a resident of Behala’s Beledanga Road.
“Maybe it was not the driver’s fault because he was moving at a reasonable speed. Later I heard a woman and child came in front of the bus and the driver tried to avoid hitting them and collided with the pool car and an auto,” Dhanuk said.
The police identified some of the other injured as pool car driver Rahul Chatterjee, attendant Ranu Sarkar, bus passenger Sushil Kumar Samanta, bus driver Susen Mitra and auto driver Soumen Bhowmick.
All of them were taken to Vidyasagar State General Hospital. Some were later shifted to other hospitals.
Sarkar suffered multiple fractures, a relative said.
“My father tried to save the children and held them tightly. But he fell with his entire body weight on his right arm, which got fractured. He received injuries in his head, too,” son Suman said.
“Some of those in the bus who were injured in the accident were guardians of students in my school. As our school is located very close to the spot where this happened, initially there was a confusion that the children in the pool car were our students. But that is not true. By the time this happened, our classes had already begun,” said teacher-in-charge of Vidya Bharati, Behala, Moutushi Chakraborty.